Children’s education and parents’ mortality – Do parents with highly educated children live longer?

Sammanfattning: While there exists a large literature on mortality inequalities by an individual’s level of education and other socioeconomic characteristics this thesis looks at the relationship between the children’s level of education and parents’ mortality, which has been relatively less studied. I use longitudinal data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) for the years 2004-2017 and conduct Cox proportional hazard regressions to assess how children’s level of education affects parents’ mortality risks. The included countries are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the Netherlands. The results show that having a child with post-compulsory education is significantly associated with lower mortality hazards for mothers and fathers even after controlling for the parent’s own level of education and income. The relationship is stronger at a lower old age (50-74 years) and also for less educated parents. A potential mechanism behind these results could be the impact children may have on parents’ health behaviours. In a cross-sectional analysis, it could be shown that children’s education is significantly associated with an increased likelihood that a parent has quit smoking. While the analyses in this thesis do not imply causality, they do reveal some interesting relationships. Lastly, the role of the type of welfare regime was assessed, though with inconclusive results. However, some differences by the gender of the parent could be found depending on the type of welfare regime, which may be interesting to explore in future research.